If you grew up drinking tea in the United States, there’s a pretty good chance tea meant one thing: a little paper bag with a string attached to it.
You dropped it in a mug, poured hot water over it, waited a few minutes, and called it tea. Honestly, that’s still how a huge number of people drink tea, and there is nothing morally superior about owning a tea infuser.
But once you start drinking good loose leaf tea, you realize that the tea bag itself was never the important part. It was just the packaging.
Loose leaf tea gives us the ability to use larger pieces of tea leaves, whole flowers, actual pieces of fruit, herbs, spices, citrus peel, and other botanicals without having to grind everything small enough to cram it into a tiny bag. And that changes quite a bit about what ends up in your cup.
So if you've been standing in front of a wall of loose leaf tea wondering whether it's actually better, whether it's harder to make, and what on earth you're supposed to buy first, consider this your guide.
What Is Loose Leaf Tea?
Loose leaf tea is exactly what it sounds like: tea sold loose rather than portioned into individual tea bags.
That can mean traditional tea made from the Camellia sinensis plant, including black, green, white, and oolong teas. It can also include herbal blends made from ingredients like rooibos, honeybush, mint, hibiscus, fruit, flowers, and spices.
The biggest difference isn't simply that one comes in a bag and one doesn't. It's what removing the constraints of that little bag allows us to put into the blend.
Open a bag of loose leaf tea and you may be able to identify the ingredients just by looking at them. You can see pieces of strawberry. Lavender flowers. Orange peel. Ginger. Peppermint leaves. Cardamom pods.
That's a pretty big part of why we make tea the way we do at Full Moon Tea Company. I want you to be able to look at your tea and understand what you're about to drink.
What's Actually Inside a Tea Bag?
This depends enormously on the tea bag.
Some companies put excellent tea into bags, sachets, or pyramids, so “tea bag” does not automatically mean “bad tea.” That's worth saying right up front.
But the traditional mass-market tea bag was designed around convenience, consistency, fast brewing, and a very small amount of space. Tea intended for those bags is often made up of much smaller pieces of leaf, commonly described in the tea industry as fannings or dust.
Those aren't mysterious ingredients. They're simply much smaller particles of tea.
Smaller tea particles have much more surface area exposed to the water, which means they extract quickly. That's useful when you want a strong cup in a couple of minutes. It can also mean that tannins and other compounds responsible for bitterness and astringency are extracted quickly.
With loose leaf tea, we have much more room to work.
Does Leaf Size Really Change How Tea Tastes?
It can.
When larger pieces of tea leaf are placed in hot water, they gradually unfurl and release their flavor. That slower extraction can create a cup with more nuance than you'd get from very finely broken leaves.
But there's another piece of this that's just as important: tea needs room.
Tea leaves absorb water and expand considerably while they steep. Put a teaspoon of dry loose leaf tea into a roomy basket infuser, and what comes out several minutes later may look like a surprising amount of wet leaf.
That's why I prefer basket-style infusers over those tiny tea balls that look adorable but give the leaves approximately the square footage of a Manhattan studio apartment.
A roomy infuser allows water to circulate around the ingredients instead of packing everything into a wet little clump.
Is Loose Leaf Tea Stronger Than Tea Bags?
Not necessarily.
“Strong” can mean several different things when we're talking about tea.
If you mean how quickly the tea becomes dark and intense, finely cut tea in a traditional bag may actually brew faster than larger loose leaves.
But faster isn't necessarily the same thing as more flavorful.
Loose leaf tea gives you more control over how much tea you use, how long you steep it, and how much space the leaves have to expand. You can make a delicate cup or an extremely strong one depending on the tea-to-water ratio and brewing time.
That's one of the things I love about it. You're not stuck with whatever amount somebody decided to seal inside an individual bag.
What About the Fruit and Flowers?
This is where loose leaf really starts getting fun.
At Full Moon, we make blends using real fruit, flowers, herbs, citrus peels, and spices. When you're not trying to fit everything into a tiny conventional tea bag, those ingredients can actually look like themselves.
A strawberry can be a piece of strawberry.
Lavender can be lavender.
Orange peel can be a visible curl of orange peel.
It also gives me a lot more freedom when I'm developing a blend. I spent 12 years working professionally as a pastry chef before starting Full Moon, so I approach tea blending much the same way I approached building flavor in food. I'm thinking about sweetness, acidity, aroma, texture, spice, bitterness, and how one ingredient changes another.
I don't want to design a flavor and then figure out how to grind it down small enough to fit inside a bag.
The ingredients are the blend.
Do Tea Bags Contain Microplastics?
This is where we need to be specific, because the internet has turned this into a much broader claim than the research actually supports.
Not every tea bag is made of plastic. Tea bags can be made from different materials, and construction varies substantially by manufacturer.
But some tea bags, particularly certain plastic mesh or “silken” styles, have been made using plastics such as nylon or polyethylene terephthalate (PET).
A widely cited 2019 study published in Environmental Science & Technology tested plastic tea bags made from nylon and PET and found that brewing one at 95°C released approximately 11.6 billion microplastic particles and 3.1 billion nanoplastic particles under the study conditions. ACS Publications
That's a striking result, but the distinction matters: the study tested plastic tea bags. It did not establish that every paper tea bag releases billions of plastic particles.
Research into human exposure to microplastics is still developing, and what different levels of exposure mean for human health isn't fully resolved. ACS Publications
For me, this is less about panic and more about simplicity. Loose leaf tea brewed in a reusable stainless-steel infuser removes the disposable tea bag from the equation entirely.
Is Loose Leaf Tea More Expensive?
This is one of the biggest misconceptions about loose leaf tea because the price on the package doesn't tell you the price of an individual cup.
A box of tea bags gives you an obvious number: 20 bags equals 20 cups.
Loose leaf requires about ten seconds of math.
The amount you'll use depends on the blend and the size of your mug, but you're typically measuring a small amount for each cup. And many loose leaf teas, particularly higher-quality traditional teas, can be steeped more than once.
That means the useful comparison is cost per cup, not simply the price of the package.
There's also a quality question. A $4 box of tea and a $16 bag of premium loose leaf tea aren't necessarily equivalent products packaged differently. The ingredients, sourcing, amount of actual tea, fruit and botanicals, and overall quality may be completely different.
Can You Steep Loose Leaf Tea More Than Once?
Often, yes.
This is one of my favorite loose leaf tricks that newer tea drinkers don't always know.
Many black, green, white, and oolong teas have enough flavor left in their leaves for another steep. The second cup won't necessarily taste identical to the first, either. Different flavors can become more noticeable as the leaves continue to open.
Some herbal blends can be resteeped too, although the results depend heavily on the ingredients.
If your first cup still leaves you with beautifully fragrant tea leaves, don't automatically throw them away. Try them again.
You already paid for them.
Isn't Loose Leaf Tea a Pain to Make?
This is probably the biggest thing keeping people from trying it, and I understand why. Loose leaf tea has somehow acquired an aura of needing special knowledge, expensive equipment, and possibly a tiny ceremonial table.
You need a mug and an infuser.
That's pretty much it.
Put the infuser in your mug, add your tea, pour in water, let it steep, and lift the basket out.
The difference between making a tea bag and making loose leaf tea is basically measuring a teaspoon.
You can absolutely get more elaborate if you want to. Tea is an enormous world, and different brewing traditions can become as detailed as you'd like them to be. But you do not need to become a tea scholar before you're allowed to make yourself a cup.
What Do You Need to Start Drinking Loose Leaf Tea?
My favorite setup for someone starting out is a stainless-steel basket infuser.
It fits directly into your mug, gives the leaves plenty of room to expand, and is easy to empty and rinse when you're finished.
You don't need a dedicated teapot. You don't need disposable filters. You don't need seven accessories lined up on your counter.
If you eventually fall down the tea rabbit hole and acquire a cupboard full of teaware, that's between you and your available cabinet space.
For now: tea, infuser, mug, water.
Which Loose Leaf Tea Should I Try First?
This is where people tend to get overwhelmed, because “loose leaf tea” isn't a flavor. It's a format.
So instead of asking which tea is best for beginners, start with something that resembles flavors you already know you like.
If you love Earl Grey: Start with Goddess Gray. You get that familiar bergamot and black tea combination, plus lavender, sweet orange peel, and cornflowers.
If you're a coffee drinker: Try Full Moon Morning. It's a straightforward, robust blend of Assam and Ceylon black teas with sweet orange peel. It has enough body to feel substantial in the morning and takes milk beautifully.
If you like fruity teas: Strawberry Honeysuckle White Tea is a great place to start. It's delicate and naturally fruity, with real strawberry and honeysuckle alongside white tea.
If you want something bright and refreshing: Try Pear & Ginger Green Tea. Pear softens the green tea while ginger and lemongrass give it some lift.
If you want cozy and spicy: You've got two very different directions. Smoky Mountains Cowboy Chai is a bold, caffeinated black tea chai with a smoky edge. Spiced Apple Chai gives you apples and warming spices on a naturally caffeine-free honeybush base.
If you don't want caffeine at all: Start exploring herbal tea. Mint, hibiscus, peach, rooibos, honeybush, fruit and flowers give you a huge range of possibilities without needing traditional tea leaves.
The best first loose leaf tea isn't the one a tea expert tells you you're supposed to appreciate.
It's the one that makes you want another cup.
So, Is Loose Leaf Tea Actually Better?
I make and sell loose leaf tea, so you can probably guess where I land.
But I don't think we need to pretend that every tea bag is terrible to explain why loose leaf is worth trying.
Tea bags are convenient. Good tea can exist in a bag. Sometimes you're traveling, sitting in a hotel room with a questionable coffee maker, and the tea bag wins.
Loose leaf simply gives us more room, more control, and more freedom to work with ingredients in forms that actually resemble the plants they came from.
For Full Moon, that's the important part. I want to open a bag of tea and see the raspberries, mint, lavender, orange peel, apples, flowers, ginger, and tea leaves that are creating the flavor in my cup. I want enough room for those ingredients to move around while they steep. And I want to be able to decide for myself whether today's mug needs one teaspoon or a little extra.
If you've spent your whole life thinking tea comes with a string attached, loose leaf can look like an entirely different hobby.
It really isn't.
Get a basket infuser. Pick a tea that sounds delicious. Put the leaves in hot water.
Welcome to loose leaf.
